Scott Albright doesn’t need to get into the office at 3am. He probably could get more than (at the most) five hours of sleep he averages each night—but that’s not the way he’s wired. For Albright, the founder, CEO and creative director of Combat Waffle Studios, the Nokomis-based, veteran-owned game development studio, the grind never stops. “My brain doesn’t shut off,” says Albright, who founded Combat Waffle Studios in 2022. “Early in the morning, the house is quiet, the office is quiet which gives me time to sit down, dive into game design documents and come up with new game ideas. By the time everybody gets into the office at 9am, it’s like you’re shot out of a cannon.” Combat Waffle—named after the military term for a landmine—was born in 2022 out of an idea. Albright, who served in the U.S. Army overseas from 2008 to 2012 before being medically discharged, had his hand in a few different careers. He was an entertainment agent and an entrepreneur as well as a world-class virtual reality video game player. For years, Albright and his VR teammates wanted a first-person extraction shooter VR game—when no one made one, he decided to take matters into his own hands. “Every year I was told that it wasn’t possible to make and there wasn’t an audience for that type of game. It was too expensive to make, the gun mechanics wouldn’t work in VR—in reality it was just really hard to do and no one wanted to take the time to do it,” says Albright. “So I decided to do it myself. I hired a team of developers, people we knew from the VR space, media guys and here we are three years later.” That initial calling turned into Ghosts of Tabor, a smash-hit which jumped to the top of VR sales charts upon its initial release in March 2023 and remains the most popular of Combat Waffle’s titles to this day. Ever since, Combat Waffle has grown exponentially—Albright moved the company, now with over 50 employees, from his AC-less Port Charlotte garage in the summer of 2022 to various office spaces, before landing on a 23,349 square foot space in Nokomis in this past February. Combat Waffle currently has three video games available: Ghosts of Tabor, Grim and Silent North—all available with early access on gaming platforms Pico, Meta Quest and Steam VR—with two other titles still in development. While Albright’s relentless drive has not changed, his motivations, the reasons behind why he finds himself in the office at 3am pouring over game design documents, have. “Before it was just selfish—I wanted Tabor so I made this game. After seeing all of the people that have flocked to the game and hearing their stories, I’ve realized that we get to motivate and touch people’s lives everyday,” says Albright. “When someone has had a bad day and they’re not sure what to do with themselves, they can boot up a game for five minutes and escape it all. ”